Spotify: Your music portal

Christmas is here and need some nice music to listen to. Or you just want to listen to some nice music. Then here is Spotify. Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.

Spotify was launched in October 2008 by Swedish start up Spotify AB and as of 15 September 2010, the service had approximately 10 million users, including 2.5 million users with paid subscriptions. The service reached 20 million users with 5 million paid subscribers by December 2012, and 40 million users with 10 million subscribers in May 2014.

Spotify has hundred thousands of songs for you to play. Spotify has a very large collection of artists, albums and songs. Spotify allows you to stream music online anytime, anywhere and on any device.

User registration is a must at Spotify. Once registered you can get access to thousands of songs. There are two types of accounts at Spotify, one is a free account and a premium account.

With a free account you can listen to unlimited music but you will be greeted by ads in your music experience. But with a premium account you can listen to songs anywhere, download music to your native Spotify client and listen offline in high quality audio. Downloading music in Spotify means you can only download music to your Spotify client and not move music out of the client. Listening offline music or downloading music option is not available for free accounts. Further with a premium account you get ad free music experience.

Now moving on with the features of Spotify. Spotify has a web player that allows you to listen to music on your PC/laptop. Once you have created your account at Spotify, you can access the web player here https://play.spotify.com. As soon you as you open the Web Player you can see various albums laid out in front of you. These are laid out depending on the season and trends. Since its Christmas you can see that some of the albums are Christmas songs.

Scrolling down, there are lots of genres and moods. You can select any genre or mood you like.

Clicking on any genre or mood slides in a new windows that has the leading playlists picked up by Spotify.

Spotify also offers a radio service that allows you to listen to various stations by various artists. As you see my favorite artist is One Direction so you can see the One Direction station playing right away when I opened up the radio section. You can click on the New Station button on the top right to select the artist whose radio station you would like to listen. Further scrolling down you can see recommendations laid out for you.

If you add any music to any of your playlists or you saved it. You can see your playlists and saved music in the “Your Music” section. The “Your Music” section has four tabs namely Playlists, Songs, Albums and Artists. In the Playlists tab you can see your playlists and the songs belonging to the playlist. In the songs tab you’ll get all your saved music and so on for Albums and Artists tab.

I could say that Spotify is more than just a music streaming service. Spotify is also a semi-social music service. You can connect your Facebook account to Spotify and find out what your friends are listening to and also listen to any playlist of theirs that they have made public. You can also follow people and artists.

Spotify Web Player has a beautiful and a very neat design and looks absolutely stunning and so those all their mobile apps. Spotify has apps for Android, Windows Phone, Microsoft Windows desktop, OS X, BlackBerry, Boxee, iOS, Linux, MeeGo, , Openpandora, , Roku, S60 (Symbian), Samsung Smart TV, Sonos, Squeezebox, Telia Digital-tv, TiVo, WD TV, webOS, Windows Mobile. Spotify doesn’t have a Windows App(not desktop) yet, but there is a third party app called Spotlite in the Windows Store.

Conclusion

Spotify being a cross-platform service allows you to carry your music across all your devices and anywhere. All the Spotify clients on all platforms have a very neat design. I would say Spotify is indeed an awesome service for streaming music.

Spotify is available only for 57 countries including major countries like the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and more. But Spotify is not available for emerging countries like India, China, Russia etc. Spotify Premium though costs $9.99 per month is worth the service. But this Christmas season Spotify has a offer, you can get first three months only for $0.99 and then $9.99 per month. This offer lasts only till December 31st 2014. You can grab offer from here. Below are the links for Spotify apps: